Projects

Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants project - EEF trial

mita-eef-partners

The Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants (MITA) project aims to improve schools’ deployment of teaching assistants in classrooms and ensure they make a valuable contribution to learning.

The project is a collaboration between UCL Institute of Education, the University of East London and the London Leadership Strategy. It is funded by the Education Endowment Foundation. Details of how schools can get involved are at the bottom of this page.

The intervention is an innovative, comprehensive and coherent programme of strategic input and CPD for school leaders and classroom staff. School leaders will undertake our MITA school improvement course, supplemented by in-school consultancy from practicising National Leaders of Education. NLEs will support schools to review current practice and provide leadership teams with support and challenge on strategic planning and implementation. 

TAs and teachers in each school will receive our Maximising the Practice of TAs training on effective interactions with pupils. TAs will be trained to use our scaffolding framework, designed to help improve pupil independence, and teachers will receive our training on planning lessons and organising classrooms effectively to capitalise on TAs' new skills.

The project will be conducted over the 2017/18 school year and will involve 100 primary schools participating in a randomised controlled trial. This means half of the schools will be randomly allocated to work with the project team on improving how TAs are used, and the other half will continue with their usual practice. The 'business as usual' schools still play a crucial role in the research (as the control group) and will receive an alternative package of support and incentives. An independent evaluation, led by RAND Europe, will formally test the impact of involvement in the intervention on pupil outcomes.

The MITA project is open to primary schools in and around the West Midlands, London and Hampshire. 

This project is now closed to expressions of interest.

For further information, please email ioe.mita@ucl.ac.uk. For news and updates on the project, follow us on Twitter @MITAproject